Workshop in conjunction with Euro-Par 2006 (29 August - 1 September 2006)

Petascale Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Craig Stewart , Michael Schroeder, Matthias Mueller

There have been announced multiple plans to create peta-scale computing
environments. The topic of this workshop will be to address what
bioinformatics or computational biology applications can or should accomplish
with such facilities, and what obstacles must be overcome in order to
implement and use effective and important problems in the life sciences
(biology, biochemistry, environmental sciences, etc.)

Suggested topics for papers and posters include, but are not limited to, the
following specific subjects:

* What does Petascale mean in terms of computation, and what are the
  possibilities of using different ways of assembling a PetaFLOPS system? What
  does it take to create a computational biology or bioinformatics application
  that achieves a sustained PetaFLOPS of calculations? What does it take to do
  this in terms of a PetaFLOPS of capacity in a traditional supercomputer, a
  FPGA-based or hybrid system, a PetaFLOPS in a grid computing system, or a
  PetaFLOPS worth of volunteer systems contributed across relatively slow
  commodity networks?

* What sort of computational biology and bioinformatics applications that
  exist now can be scaled up to perform useful work and provide new insights
  on these various types of Peta-scale platforms.

* Given a resource capable of a PetaFLOPS of sustained performance, what sort
  of new and novel applications could be written? What would we model? What
  would we analyze? What are the programming environment requirements to take
  advantage of such a system?

* Petascale computing means of course more than PetaFLOPS of calculations. It
  means PetaBytes of storage. What are the I/O and data management
  requirements of computational biology and bioinformatics applications that
  will take advantage of PetaBytes to hundreds of PetaBytes of life sciences
  data? How will we manage, organize, reliably archive, and reliably retrieve
  and use Petascale life science data stores?

* How will Petascale computational biology and bioinformatics applications be
  organized and accessed so as to have the greatest possible impact on the
  largest possible community of researchers?

* What evolutionary path of applications and problems will aid the process of
  moving from the current state of bioinformatics and computational biology to
  effective Petascale applications? What are the steps along the way for the
  high performance computing community and the life sciences research
  community?

Submission Guidelines:
Submissions should include an abstract, keywords, the e-mail address of the
principal author (contact person), and must not exceed 15 pages, including
tables and figures, with PDF or PostScript. However, short papers of around 4
pages are encouraged for work-in-progress contributions. Please make your
electronic submission to the following address: bioworkshop@europar2006.de

Submission of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, should the
paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register and attend the
conference workshop to present the paper or the poster.

Papers will be refereed and accepted on the basis of their scientific merit
and relevance to the workshop topics.

Publication:
The proceedings of the workshop will be published in the dedicated Euro-Par
workshop proceedings.

Workshop Chairs:
* Dr. Craig Stewart (Indiana University, USA)
* Dr. Michael Schroeder (Technische Universitaet Dresden, Germany)
* Dr. Matthias Mueller (Technische Universitaet Dresden, Germany)

Please send your papers or any questions to: bioworkshop@europar2006.de   

For more details see: 
http://www.europar2006.de/ 

Important Dates:

Submission of Papers:		 15 June 2006

Notification of Acceptance:	 15 July 2006

Camera-Ready Papers:		 16 September 2006